Chapter 37
THE GREAT STORM
‘It’s good to be home,’ she said after debuting with me in MacMillan’s Anastasia.
On stage, grappling with the physical and psychological demands of the ballet’s tragic arc and brutalist atmosphere, it had brought me some much-needed comfort to smile up at her Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, resplendent in white lace, gloves, and an enormous hat.
‘Please never leave us again,’ I begged afterwards in the dressing room.
‘Well, we’re trying for a second baby, but I promise I won’t leave again after that.’
‘A second? You want to go through that hideous morning sickness for a second time?’
‘Oh, darling, I know. I don’t like to think about it. But Armand thinks we should strike while the iron’s still hot, if you will. It felt like a miracle that we got Layla. I don’t want that luck to fade if I get too old.’
‘Sounds stressful.’
‘Un petit peu.’ She sighed. ‘It’s not proving quite as easy this time around. But we remain hopeful.’
I was trying to remain hopeful too, for a very different reason.
Tackling Anastasia without Sander by my side had almost wiped me out, but now that I had my first MacMillan lead role under my belt, now that he had directed me in the studio, I was anxious if it had been enough to pave the way to Juliet.
She was in my top three dream roles, and I wasn’t getting any younger.
* * *
When Sander returned from Milan, we went straight into Cinderella, the first full-length ballet Ashton ever choreographed.
The stage call went well enough, but I packed up my things in the dressing room with worries skittering around my body.
I was nervous about my Act II manège: two laps of posé and piqué turns that left me so breathless, the hardest part of the entire rehearsal had been standing upstage during Sander’s solo afterwards, trying not to keel over.
What worried me even more was the wind rattling the dressing room windows – it hadn’t let up all day, and there had been talk on a radio phone-in of hurricanes. As the owner of a top-floor flat, that was the last thing I wanted to hear.
‘Oh dear, the poor vendors!’
Fiona was in the lounge near the company noticeboard, staring through the window at the Covent Garden markets below.
I followed her sight-line to a small jewellery seller’s marquee as two of the corners blew off their feet.
Threads of silver and gold fluttered onto the cobblestones along with the vendor’s beanie hat.
‘It’s like my solo’s playing out across the city,’ she said, referring to the Autumn Fairy’s madcap leaf-twirling dance in Act I.
We reached the stage door just as Frank, the building’s doorman of many years, was opening it to let Sander and Jamie out, along with Lorenzo, a soloist who seemed to put Jamie at ease just by being near him.
They’d grown closer ever since their turn as two of the Mechanicals in The Dream; Jamie had spent the entire flight back from Stockholm wondering what Lorenzo was up to at that moment, and extolling his talent for making pasta from scratch.
They’d already slept together in the past, but whether they’d resumed was unclear, given Jamie’s vow of celibacy.
If he was going to break it, at least it was for someone who made him so content.
When we stepped out onto Bow Street, everyone’s hair blew out of control, the grand eighteenth-century buildings transformed into a wind tunnel.
‘Bloody hell.’ Jamie squinted at us as he and Lorenzo peeled off. ‘Get home safe, my loves! Don’t blow away!’
‘I’m getting a cab,’ Fiona declared. ‘Will you be all right, Trix? You can always ring if you need me.’
I hugged her and kissed her very cold cheek. ‘Thank you.’
Sander offered to walk me to Holborn tube station, letting me hook my arm around his for support as the wind tried to buffet us into the road.
‘You fear storms?’
‘They’re scary things. Especially in a flat like mine – everything sounds louder at the top. And roof repairs are expensive. Days like this make me nervous, that’s all.’
When we reached the station, I reluctantly slipped my arm out of his and rooted around for my ticket.
I still had no idea where Sander lived, but I knew now that it wasn’t on the Central line.
I decided to ask him which line he did use, or if he was within walking distance, before I forgot yet again.
But then, as if the wind erased the question from my conscious mind and pulled up the one waiting beneath, I asked: ‘Could you stay with me tonight?’
He blinked, then leaned in closer to make sure he hadn’t misheard.
‘Sorry, I know it’s a silly thing to ask, and very last-minute, and – but, well, you’re right. I am afraid. And I’d really rather not be alone overnight if I can help it. If, that is, you don’t mind… I mean, if it’s not too—’
He stepped inside the station, then raised his arm towards the ticket barriers. After you. ‘It’s not too…’ he said, emphasising the ellipses until I laughed.
* * *
I apologised as soon as I opened the front door – for the narrow flights of stairs, the cluttered shoe rack, the clothes horse of tights and dance skirts drying by the window, the fact that all I had in the kitchen cupboard was three soup tins and half a rustic loaf that was verging on stale.
At least I managed to do a quick sweep of the bathroom and hide my waxing strips.
It had been so long since I’d had someone over.
I hosted small dinner parties every once in a while, Fiona and Jamie came over regularly, but no one had ever stayed the night.
I encouraged Sander to choose a cassette so that we could listen to something other than the banshee wind. He hit play on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.
‘Oh yes, this is a good album for autumn.’
‘I almost chose Prokofiev,’ he said, holding up the London Symphony Orchestra’s 1983 recording of Cinderella.
‘I’d have thought you’d had enough Cinderella for one day.’ I tried to elevate the bowls of Heinz tomato soup by adding basil leaves and a few twists of black pepper. ‘I know I have. The manège almost finished me.’
Between “Dreams” and the opening piano notes of “Songbird”, Sander and I stuck to familiar conversational ground: what had changed between the first rehearsal and the stage call; how the music during Cinderella’s encounter with her Fairy Godmother had felt so much more enchanting with the full force of the orchestra behind it; the subtle differences between the palace ballroom Act II solos and the grand pas of The Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake.
‘In Beauty they perform for court on the wedding day. In Swan Lake, Odile knows it is illusion, even if Siegfried does not. But Cinderella and Prince, we look only at each other. For all we care, other guests could vanish. Covent Garden audience could vanish. Like Bayadère Act I, Nikiya and Solor: they declare love only to each other.’
Sander looked at me. The wind continued to howl, and Christine McVie continued to sing.
‘Have you loved…’ He paused, put his spoon down, and moved his fingers in the air as if adjusting a typewriter platen. ‘Have you ever been in love?’
Now I knew how I would keep myself still after my Act II solo: all I had to do was remember that question in his voice, his eyes looking directly into mine.
Be careful, Trix.
I sipped my water and wished life were more like a cassette, with buttons to rewind and fast-forward. ‘I don’t know.’
Sander blinked. ‘You don’t know? But… surely you would?’ His tone was free of judgement. It was more like I’d handed him a puzzle to solve.
Mercifully, “Songbird” finished and the slow, almost meditative thump of “The Chain” began.
‘If being in love is anything like what we dance in our fairy tales then you’re right, I suppose I would know. But I’m not very good at allowing anyone to get close enough to fall in love. Not the proper, marrying sort of love.’
‘You think love happens in marriage only?’
‘Well, no. But then again…’ I rested my hands on the table and tried to articulate something I’d never had to outside of my own head before.
‘Isn’t marriage the ultimate validation?
Suddenly, definitively, with all your nearest and dearest as witnesses, the worst things you’ve told yourself are proven false, because someone has decided to spend the rest of their life with you.
Someone has seen you, taken the time to get to know you.
And they like what they see. They like what they know. ’
‘If they know you,’ he said, bitterly enough to throw me off.
In my mind’s eye, Fiona sat on my sofa, mouthing just one word: Guarded.
‘You’re right. I don’t make it easy.’
‘Oh, no, I did not…’ Sander’s hands briefly crossed, as if warding off something. ‘I meant myself.’ He gave a sheepish smile that made heat flicker around my ribcage. ‘I do not make it easy.’
‘Well… I know why I only let others get so close before I put the walls up, so to speak. I can’t give them what they want, in the end.
Not everything they want.’ Sander opened his mouth as if deliberating the most appropriate response, but I didn’t want to hear it.
The walls were already rising. Retreat, retreat.
‘I don’t know, I’m tired. I’m not making sense.
’ I cleared the table, staying Sander’s hand when he offered to help.
I turned to the sink, because I wasn’t sure I could bear to watch his face when I asked, ‘Why? Have you ever been in love?’
I ran the tap and got some suds going in the basin.
I sponged the plates and slotted them into the drying rack.
“The Chain” switched tempo.
I rinsed the bowls and nested them on the other side.
Rain speckled the skylight.
Still holding the tea towel, I turned around.
Sander hadn’t moved from the dining table. He’d turned his attention to my framed photos on the mantelpiece. ‘I used to think love was not for someone like me.’
Someone like him? What did that mean? I searched for clues in his expression, but it was sealed off. ‘Used to?’